Speaking as someone who just a few months ago was lying in a hospital
bed, with a bandaged head, wondering if I would recover enough to live a
normal life, coping with the fear that I would never be able to function
as a musician again, my reaction to Alberto’s success has been stunned silence.

Yes, yes, laughter and many tears, too. I know that my feelings on this
subject are personal and very subjective. But I won’t withhold them. I’m
crazy, okay? I had brain surgery.

Life is precious, also strange. Answers to the most deeply disturbing
problems come from unexpected sources.

I know now that when I came out from under anesthesia after surgery, it
was Alberto Contador’s birthday. When my husband read to me that Alberto
had signed with Discovery Channel in January, I gasped, and drew in the first
deep and healing breath of life in many months.

Contador has been an uncanny beacon to me in 2007. He has drawn me up,
off the sickbed. There has consistently been a divine sense of timing throughout
illness and recovery. Part of it has been the number of times I’ve tuned
into a live broadcast seconds before Alberto attacked, put down the hammer,
and won a race.

Fate had it that Alberto Contador’s example would bring me back to life.
I’ve been strangely blessed to draft him up one hell of a mountain. The process
has drummed out a tattoo in my fragile head: Get up, Rebecca. Go on. Try
again. It feels good to fight. Illness is a gift that gives you a special
edge, unique perspective, hors catégorie capacities.

I was in Vienna last week, catching up on the Tour between duties accompanying
student opera performances. Following in the footsteps of Mozart in the city,
I knew there was a parallel here, and emailed my husband Er ist so wie ein
junger Mozart. He’s like young Mozart.

Alberto is now a superstar. Mixed with the sweetness of his success are
slings and arrows to be endured—crushes of people, bodyguards, suspicion
and rank nastiness from the press.

The press, a seething flashing school of piranha fish. A question the
young hero can’t escape is “Did he do this under his own power? Did he have
‘help’ going up the Plateau de Beille, over the Galibier?”

To this, I just laugh, and revert to the angle Peter Shaffer took in his
play Amadeus. Contador is deeply blessed, divinely touched. A mortal, of
course, nevertheless God’s own creature.

Alberto finished the final lap of the Champs Élysées today,
and was proclaimed winner of the Tour de France 2007. Clad in yellow from
head to toe—save for patches of white in honor of his Best Young Rider
status—he celebrated his epic victory with the rest of the team. “It’s
an incredible sensation, to feel in your skin the sound of the Spanish
national anthem while on the podium. It’s a dream come true.”

Contador went from the suffering of the time trial to the immense happiness
of the podium in Paris. “In the TT, I had checks on my rivals,” he remembered,
“but I did’t know if they were giving me the good or bad times. The stage
was a heart attack, but that way you savored it more,” said the maillot
jaune, who admitted he didn’t expect to win this Tour. “When I took the
start I was anticipating a fight for the white jersey, but I didn’t know
that the yellow one would come, too.”

Contador refused comparisons with his predecessor on Discovery Channel,
the legendary Lance Armstrong. “I already know that comparisions can’t be
made. At the moment I have won one Tour and next year I will come with a
lot of motivation, certainly, but the most important thing now is the party
that we’ll have tonight. Nobody can take that away from us.”